Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism

Description

***Evening Standard's best non-fiction 2021***

"Horgan's suggestions will appeal to anyone who has ever done a job they hated..."--The Guardian

"Work hard, get paid". It's simple. Self-evident. But it's also a lie - at least for most of us. For people today, the old assumptions are crumbling; hard work in school no longer guarantees a secure, well-paying job in the future. Far from a gateway to riches and fulfilment, 'work' means precarity, anxiety and alienation.

Amelia Horgan poses three big questions here: what is work? How does it harm us? And what can we do about it? While abolishing work altogether is not the answer, Lost in Work shows that when we are able to take control of our workplaces, we become less miserable, and can work towards the transformative goal of experimenting with 'work' as we know it. Chapters include:

*Work, capitalism and capitalist work
*Contesting 'work'
*The paradox of new work
*What does work to do us as individuals
*What does work to do society
*Phantoms and slackers: Resistance and work
*Time off: Resistance to work

For a new generation of workers dealing with Covid19, work from home, hybrid work, burnout, anxiety, and more, author Amelia Hogan offers a clear-eyed look at the work we do and suggests that in a new work in which work as we know it has changed dramatically, "we might think that something needs to change." Maybe change begins with reading this remarkably revelatory book, because Hogan articulates that gnawing feeling that we have at the office that something isn't right and that the systems of our civilization are designed to chain and subdue us.